Linguists quoted in
The UMass Daily Jolt

• Kyle Johnson
• John Kingston
• John McCarthy
• Ellen Woolford
• Adam Werle

Track them down from here.

Faultiest reasoning of the week

Some Loner

[Thanks Atrios!]

Cracks in the ivory tower

[Thanks Crooked Timber!]

For Japanese, family names are the worst growing pains

[Thanks Leah!]

[Thanks Ali Potts!]

Elizabeth Zsiga

Georgetown University

Post-lexical phonology in a post-derivational theory: Evidence from Thai

Friday, November 19, 3:30 pm, in Machmar W-25/26

Reception and dinner afterwards

Johah writes:

I'm in Buenos Aires at the moment, having just returned from a two-week trip in Andean Patagonia. The picture shows me and some friends from various parts of South America on a lookout point above Lago Escondido, in the scenic Siete Lagos region (I'm the beautiful blonde girl).

We rented a tiny Fiat and drove all over the region, taking in the pristine glacial lakes and snow-capped Andean peaks.

Buenos Aires has been great. I've been hanging out with a bunch of Argentine guys and working on my Spanish. They speak a really difficult dialect here called Lunfardo. It features slang words and expressions from Genovese and other dialects of Italian, as well as pervasive consonant deletion and a completely different second-person familiar form of address. I had huge problems understanding people when I first got here, but it's slowly getting easier. I even throw in some genuine Buenos Aires foul language when I speak now.

I'll be traveling into the winter, and in February I'll be back in Amherst, working on John Kingston's NIH grant project and awaiting word from grad schools. I look forward to being back in South College, and leaving my property management job in Boston behind me forever. I hope everybody has a great semester, and I'll see you all soon.

Best,
Jonah

On November 18, Rajesh Bhatt will guest lecture in Barbara Partee's 726 (mathematics for and in linguistics)

On the relationship between OT and finite state morphology

The Eisner/Frank & Satta/Karttunen debate on how under certain restrictions OT has the same power as finite state morphology, and by extension SPE style phonology with replacement rules.

Readings:

• Frank, Robert, and Satta, Giorgio. 1998. Optimality theory and the generative complexity of constraint violability. Computational Linguistics 24:307-315.

• Karttunen, Lauri. 1998. The proper treatment of Optimality Theory in computational phonology. Paper presented at FSMNLP'98. To appear in Proceedings of the International Workshop on Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing, June 29-July 1, 1998, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. ROA-258-0498. [HTML, Postscript, PDF].

• Karttunen, Lauri. 2001. Applications of Finite-State Transducers in Natural Language Processing. In Implementation and Application of Automata. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 2088, eds. S. Yu and A. Paun, 34-46. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.

The SRG will this week discuss:

David Lewis. 1983. Individuation by acquaintance and by stipulation. The Philosophical Review 92:3-32.

The meeting details are:

• Thursday, November 17
• 8 pm ish
• chez Florian

Lately there's been a lot of wine bringing, which has been successful and should be encouraged ... and shouldn't we maybe have those crackers that go with wine, and perhaps some cheese?

[Thanks AMT!]

Bernhard Schwarz and Junko Shimoyama will speak in Angelika Kratzer's proseminar and December 6 and December 13 respectively (Hasbrouck 242; 2:30-5:15). Everyone is welcome!

December 6: Bernhard Schwarz

Interpreting superlatives

In this session, we will look at two related phenomena involving the interpretation of superlative adjectives. First, attributive superlative adjectives participate in the so-called absolute/comparative ambiguity. For example, John climbed the highest mountain can be taken to convey that John climbed Mount Everest or merely that he climbed a higher mountain then everybody else did. Second, like the semantically related particle only, -est associates with focus. For example, John is fondest of MARY differs truth conditionally from JOHN is fondest of Mary. We will examine existing analyses of these phenomena and discuss their implications for the interfaces of semantics with syntax and pragmatics.

• Heim, Irene. 1999. Notes on Superlatives, manuscript, MIT.
• Farkas, Donka F. and Katalin E. Kiss. 2000. On the comparative and absolute reading of superlatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18, 417-455.
• Sharvit, Yael and Penka Stateva. 2002. Superlative expressions, context, and focus. Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 453-504.
• Stateva, Penka. 2003. Superlative More. In Robert B. Young and Yuping Zhou, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XIII, 276-291. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
• Szabolcsi, Anna. 1986. Comparative Superlatives. In Naoki Fukui et al., eds., MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 8, 245-265. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

December 13: Junko Shimoyama

Adjectival modifiers with predicative sources?

It has been suggested that certain adjectival modifiers (e.g., visible in the stars visible) should be treated as having predicative sources within relative clauses (e.g. Larson 1999 and a series of subsequent works by him and his co-authors; Alexiadou 2001). Similar claims have been made for pre-nominal adjectives in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (e.g. Sproat and Shih 1991, Kim 2002). In this session, I would like to examine such claims against apparent counter-evidence presented in Yamakido 2000. Crucial data are drawn from areas such as the interpretation of superlatives, other non-intersective modifiers, and temporal interpretation.

• Alexiadou, Artemis. 2001. Adjective syntax and noun raising: Word order asymmetries in the DP as the result of adjective distribution. Studia Linguistica 55:217-248.
• Kim, Min-Joo. 2002 The absence of adjective category in Korean. A revised version of 'Does Korean have adjectives?' MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 43, 71-89.
• Larson, Richard K. 1999. Semantics of adjectival modification. Lecture notes, LOT Winter School, Amsterdam.
• Sproat, Richard and Chilin Shih. 1991. The cross-linguistic distribution of adjective ordering restrictions. In C. Georgopoulos and R. Ishihara (eds.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language: Essays in Honor of S.-Y. Kuroda, 565-593. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Yamakido. 2002. Japanese attributive adjectives are not (all) relative clauses. In Proceedings of WCCFL 19, 588-602. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Luis Alonso-Ovalle is an invited speaker (the sole graduate student on the program) at the upcoming NYU workshop Polarity From Different Perspectives.

Christopher Potts is an invited speaker at the (In-)Determinacy of Meaning workshop that will take place as part of the annual meeting of the DGfS (German Linguistics Society), in Cologne, Germany, February 23-25, 2005.

Also at the (In-)Determinacy of Meaning workshop:

• Christopher Potts and Tom Roeper: 'The narrowing acquisition path: From declarative to expressive small clauses'
• Lynsey Wolter: 'Partial blocking in a definite system'